Suspected Islamist militants have stabbed to death a Hindu priest at a temple inBangladesh and shot and wounded a devotee who went to his aid.

Police said the attack on Sunday was perpetrated by a local militant group, whileIslamic State claimed responsibility in a statement issued via social media.

Bangladesh has experienced a wave of militant violence in recent months, including a series of bomb attacks on mosques and Hindu temples.

Some of the attacks have been claimed by Isis, which has said it was behind the killings of a Japanese citizen, an Italian aid worker and a policeman.

Five or six attackers cut the throat of the priest, Jogeshwar Roy, 55, as he was organising prayers at the Deviganj temple near Panchagar, 308 miles north of the capital, Dhaka, police said.

Police have arrested four people who are members of theJama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh, police official Humayun Kabir said, rejecting the claim by Isis which was issued through the Telegram messaging app and Twitter.

“In a security operation facilitated by the almighty God, soldiers of the Caliphate liquidated the priest Jogeshwar Roy, the founder and the head of the Deviganj temple that belongs to the infidel Hindus,” the Isis statement read in Arabic.

“One of his companions was hurt after being targeted with light weapons in the area of Panchagar in Northern Bangladesh, and the Mujahideen returned to their positions unharmed, and all praise be to God.”

The devotee who tried to stop the priest’s attackers was shot in the leg before the group fled, Kabir said.

The government denies that Isis has a presence in the country of 160 million people. Police have blamed earlier attacks on homegrown Islamist militants.

I doubt it really is part of the organized ISIS network. Any muslim nowadays is doing some crime and saying he's with Isis.

If the Isis problem actually grows to an extent where the safety of the minorities' survival in Bangladesh is questioned, India & the UN will be morally obliged to take part in a military operation there to eliminate Isis elements.

But, such developments are highly unlikely. Even at it's peak, Isis isn't likely to get ahead of small disorganized attacks here & there that can be effectively handled by the Bangladeshi Government forces.

Gujarat comes to mind. Also western nations bombing syria etc are Christian.

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Gujarat???? do you want to say sorry for burning those 60 innocent Hindus???

Gujarat happened in retaliation of burning 60 hindus alive including Women and children totally unprovoked. Syria bombed to save innocents from ISIS. For which reason Muslims killed people all around? Why ISIS killing and raping people, American, japanese, Chinese, Hindus and those who are their brothers, fellow citizen, Yazidis?

There is a clear difference. One ideology wants to deny right to live to all other than them. The fifth columnist and radicals have all sympathy for them.

Muslim extremism with handbook of terror provokes and promotes extremists in other communities.

“One reason people send kids to madrasa is that a hafiz can get to paradise and take 10 other people along,” Rafi notes, explaining a local belief about getting to heaven. “My mother wanted me to be a hafiz, so I could be her ticket to paradise.”

Some assholes are bend on Afghan weed and wet dreams!!

My Friend, the Former Muslim Extremist

WHENEVER a Muslim carries out a terror attack in the West, the question arises: Why do they hate us?

Provocative answers come from my friend Rafiullah Kakar, who has lived a more astonishing life than almost anyone I know. Rafi is a young Pakistani who used to hate the United States and support the Taliban. His brother joined the Taliban for a time, but now I worry that the Taliban might try to kill Rafi — ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

One of 13 children, Rafi is a Pashtun who grew up in a mud home close to the Afghan border, in an area notorious for tribal feuds and violent clashes. His parents are illiterate farmers, and it looked as if Rafi’s education would end in the fifth grade, when he was sent to a madrasa. His mom wanted him to become a hafiz, someone who has memorized the entire Quran.
“One reason people send kids to madrasa is that a hafiz can get to paradise and take 10 other people along,” Rafi notes, explaining a local belief about getting to heaven. “My mother wanted me to be a hafiz, so I could be her ticket to paradise.”

Ultimately, Rafi’s life was transformed because his eldest brother, Akhtar, pinched pennies and sent Rafi to the best public school in the family’s home province, Balochistan. Rafi had an outstanding mind and rocketed to the top of his class. But he also fell under the spell of political Islam. A charismatic Islamic studies teacher turned Rafi into a Taliban sympathizer who despised the West.

“I subscribed to conspiracy theories that 9/11 was done by the Americans themselves, that there were 4,000 Jews who were absent from work that day,” Rafi recalls. “I thought the Taliban were freedom fighters.”
I’ve often written about education as an antidote to extremism. But in Pakistan, it was high school that radicalized Rafi. “Education can be a problem,” Rafi says dryly.

He’s right. It’s possible to be too glib about the impact of education: Osama bin Laden was an engineer. Ayman al-Zawahri, the current leader of Al Qaeda, is a trilingual surgeon. Rafi notes that Pakistani doctors or engineers are sometimes extremists because in that country’s specialized education system they gain the confidence of a university degree without the critical thinking that (ideally) comes from an acquaintance with the liberal arts.

Donor countries should support education, Rafi says, but pay far more attention to the curriculum. I think he’s right, and we should also put more pressure on countries like Saudi Arabia to stop financing extremist madrasas in poor countries in Africa and Asia.

We should also invest in girls’ education, for it changes entire societies. Educated women have fewer children, which reduces the youth bulge in a population — one of the factors that correlates most strongly to terrorism and war. And educating girls changes boys. Ones like Rafi.

When Rafi attended college in the city of Lahore, he encountered educated women for the first time. Previously, he had assumed that girls have second-rate minds, and that educated women have loose morals.

“I’d never interacted with a woman,” he said. “Then in college there were these talented, outspoken women in class. It was a shock.” It was part of an intellectual journey that led Rafi to become a passionate advocate for girls’ education, including in his own family. His oldest sisters are illiterate, but his youngest sister is bound for college.

Rafi won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Augustana College in South Dakota, an experience that left him more understanding of the United States, though still exasperated at many American policies. After college he won a Rhodes scholarship, and last year he completed graduate studies at Oxford.

He’s now in London, writing for Pakistani newspapers, and he plans to return to Pakistan to start a boarding school for poor children in Balochistan, and ultimately to enter politics — if the Taliban don’t get him on a return trip to his village.

Today Rafi is a voice against the Taliban, against conspiracy theories and against blind anti-Americanism, in part because the United States did not take Donald Trump’s advice to ban Muslims. Extremist American voices like Trump’s, Rafi says, empower extremist voices throughout the Islamic world.

“It’s people like Donald Trump who are put forward by the extremists back home,” Rafi told me. “It pours cold water on us.”

To fight Islamic terrorism, the West spends billions of dollars on drones, missiles and foreign bases. Yet we neglect education and the empowerment of women, which if done right can be even more transformative. The trade-offs are striking: For the cost of deploying one soldier for a year, we could start more than 20 schools.

Rafi teaches us that a book can be a more powerful force against extremism than a drone. But it has to be the right book!

It's convenient for a muslim to say that about others to find solace in erroneous moral equivalence. It's like a mass murderer claiming to be equal in stature with a petty pickpocket because technically they're both 'criminals'. No sane person is buying your equal-equal snake oil anymore, except maybe for Bengalis, those Jholawalas love oil in everything, fish, hair, propaganda.

Saudis Must Stop Exporting ExtremismISIS Atrocities Started With Saudi Support for Salafi Hate

ALONG with a billion Muslims across the globe, I turn to Mecca in Saudi Arabia every day to say my prayers. But when I visit the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the resting place of the Prophet Muhammad, I am forced to leave overwhelmed with anguish at the power of extremism running amok in Islam’s birthplace. Non-Muslims are forbidden to enter this part of the kingdom, so there is no international scrutiny of the ideas and practices that affect the 13 million Muslims who visit each year.

Last week, Saudi Arabia donated $100 million to the United Nations to fund a counterterrorism agency. This was a welcome contribution, but last year, Saudi Arabia rejected a rotating seat on the United Nations Security Council. This half-in, half-out posture of the Saudi kingdom is a reflection of its inner paralysis in dealing with Sunni Islamist radicalism: It wants to stop violence, but will not address the Salafism that helps justify it.

Let’s be clear: Al Qaeda, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram, the Shabab and others are all violent Sunni Salafi groupings. For five decades, Saudi Arabia has been the official sponsor of Sunni Salafism across the globe.

Most Sunni Muslims around the world, approximately 90 percent of the Muslim population, are not Salafis. Salafism is seen as too rigid, too literalist, too detached from mainstream Islam. While Shiite and other denominations account for 10 percent of the total, Salafi adherents and other fundamentalists represent 3 percent of the world’s Muslims.

Unlike a majority of Sunnis, Salafis are evangelicals who wish to convert Muslims and others to their “purer” form of Islam — unpolluted, as they see it, by modernity. In this effort, they have been lavishly supported by the Saudi government, which has appointed emissaries to its embassies in Muslim countries who proselytize for Salafism. The kingdom also grants compliant imams V.I.P. access for the annual hajj, and bankrolls ultraconservative Islamic organizations like the Muslim World League and World Assembly of Muslim Youth.

After 9/11, under American pressure, much of this global financial support dried up, but the bastion of Salafism remains strong in the kingdom, enforcing the hard-line application of outdated Shariah punishments long abandoned by a majority of Muslims. Just since Aug. 4, 19 people have been beheaded in Saudi Arabia, nearly half for nonviolent crimes.

We are rightly outraged at the beheading of James Foley by Islamist militants, and by ISIS’ other atrocities, but we overlook the public executions by beheading permitted by Saudi Arabia. By licensing such barbarity, the kingdom normalizes and indirectly encourages such punishments elsewhere. When the country that does so is the birthplace of Islam, that message resonates.

I lived in Saudi Arabia’s most liberal city, Jidda, in 2005. That year, in an effort to open closed Saudi Salafi minds, King Abdullah supported dialogue with people of other religions. In my mosque, the cleric used his Friday Prayer sermon to prohibit such dialogue on grounds that it put Islam on a par with “false religions.” It was a slippery slope to freedom, democracy and gender equality, he argued — corrupt practices of the infidel West.

The influence that clerics wield is unrivaled. Even Saudis’ Twitter heroes are religious figures: An extremist cleric like Muhammad al-Arifi, who was banned last year from the European Union for advocating wife-beating and hatred of Jews, commands a following of 9. 4 million. The kingdom is also patrolled by a religious police force that enforces the veil for women, prohibits young lovers from meeting and ensures that shops do not display “indecent” magazine covers. In the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the religious police beat women with sticks if they stray into male-only areas, or if their dress is considered immodest by Salafi standards. This is not an Islam that the Prophet Muhammad would recognize.

Salafi intolerance has led to the destruction of Islamic heritage in Mecca and Medina. If ISIS is detonating shrines, it learned to do so from the precedent set in 1925 by the House of Saud with the Wahhabi-inspired demolition of 1,400-year-old tombs in the Jannat Al Baqi cemetery in Medina. In the last two years, violent Salafis have carried out similar sectarian vandalism, blowing up shrines from Libya to Pakistan, from Mali to Iraq. Fighters from Hezbollah have even entered Syria to protect holy sites.

Textbooks in Saudi Arabia’s schools and universities teach this brand of Islam. The University of Medina recruits students from around the world, trains them in the bigotry of Salafism and sends them to Muslim communities in places like the Balkans, Africa, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Egypt, where these Saudi-trained hard-liners work to eradicate the local, harmonious forms of Islam.

What is religious extremism but this aim to apply Shariah as state law? This is exactly what ISIS (Islamic State) is attempting do with its caliphate. Unless we challenge this un-Islamic, impractical and flawed concept of trying to govern by a rigid interpretation of Shariah, no amount of work by a United Nations agency can unravel Islamist terrorism.

Saudi Arabia created the monster that is Salafi terrorism. It cannot now outsource the slaying of this beast to the United Nations. It must address the theological and ideological roots of extremism at home, starting in Mecca and Medina. Reforming the home of Islam would be a giant step toward winning against extremism in this global battle of ideas.

But which community has the "most" extremists? Can you keep living in denial? I am sorry but i cannot do this any more.

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If you argue it this way then he will rejoice that you have, in principle, accepted his contention that Hindus and muslims are morally equal and the only difference lies in the number of extremists. As to why there are less Hindu extremists, he will claim that it might be a result of Hindu laziness but as long as he gets to establish any sort of moral equivalence, you have already lost the debate. Don't let him walk away from the debate with the satisfaction of having convinced you that 'we are both equal'.

Think about it, even after killing millions, have you ever seen a muslim or a secular endorse or allow the use of the phrase 'muslim extemist'? No. When such is their reluctance to resist facts in the face of extraordinary evidence, what makes you so eager to admit the premise of a Hindu extremists? even people like you are to blame here. Your narrative itself has a flaw in it, that is why you can't win.

Don't allow adversarial ideologues to establish equivalence at any point. If you build your arguments on the premise set by the adversary, you are already setting yourself up to lose. If you want to win, you need to question the premise itself. Unless you are willing to reject the very premise of there being such a thing as a 'Hindu extremist' while simultaneously making him concede the omnipresence of muslim extremists, there is no point jumping into any debate. If you are playing by the rules set by the adversary then you will forever be running around in circles and never win. Have you ever seen a suicide bomber blowing himself up shouting Krishna Hu Akbar? then there's no Hindu extremism. Everything else is equivocation.

My acute sense of justice does not allow me to take an extreme position. It then comes down to making a blanket statement like "There are no hindu extremists", or another one like "Only muslims are extremists". If i were to make such a claim that would start a debate on how hindus have been extremists( the degrees of comparative extremism) That will move the discussion away from Islamic extremism and become a them v/s us debate. This would defeat the purpose of the thread and might even derail it. My approach is to lead the discussion on to the next logical point and may be a more softer approach but it works in engaging people in discussion and introspection rather than point scoring. I don't mind losing the debate but i would be happy to leave the person disturbed and unsure about his claim. That said there is never one single way to win over your opponents.

If you argue it this way then he will rejoice that you have, in principle, accepted his contention that Hindus and muslims are morally equal and the only difference lies in the number of extremists. As to why there are less Hindu extremists, he will claim that it might be a result of Hindu laziness but as long as he gets to establish any sort of moral equivalence, you have already lost the debate. Don't let him walk away from the debate with the satisfaction of having convinced you that 'we are both equal'.

Think about it, even after killing millions, have you ever seen a muslim or a secular endorse or allow the use of the phrase 'muslim extemist'? No. When such is their reluctance to resist facts in the face of extraordinary evidence, what makes you so eager to admit the premise of a Hindu extremists? even people like you are to blame here. Your narrative itself has a flaw in it, that is why you can't win. Have you ever seen someone blowing themselves up shouting Krishna Hu Akbar?

Don't allow them to establish equivalence at any point. If you build your arguments on the premise set by the adversary, you are already setting yourself up to lose. If you want to win, you need to question the premise itself. Unless you are willing to reject the very premise of there being such a thing as a 'Hindu extremist' while simultaneously making him concede the omnipresence of muslim extremists, there is no point jumping into any debate. If you are playing by the rules set by the adversary then you will forever be running around in circles and never win.

There is. If not there there would be no point of a debate. It's verbal judo. If you don't manage to get the adversary, or the fence sitters, to amend their position after having debated with you, then there's no point in the debate, right?

It doesn't detail the thread since it's about ISIS, muslim extremists and Hindu priest. It's a perfectly relevant debate.

"My acute sense of justice does not allow me to take an extreme position. It then comes down to making a blanket statement"

^^^ One major problem actually is that lot of Hindus online will swear on how innocent and loyal muzzies are. On top of this Indians are fragmented unlike abhrahamics. Nothing seem to change this perspective of Mindus .

Now I am started to think may be war is the only answer. Only if caliphate attacks while Mindus (have demographic advantage) may have some chance. Otherwise India is screwed in my opinion.
I am just giving opinion on India situation.. don't know authenticity of this report.